An anonymous reader writes: The National Institute of Standards and Technology has opened a competition to develop a new cryptographic "hash" algorithm, a tool for converting a file, message or block of data to a short "fingerprint" for use in digital signatures, message authentication and other computer security applications. NIST says the competition is its response to recent advances in the analysis of hash algorithms, and that the new hash algorithm will be called Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3).